Tim Grierson

A bullet-riddled tale of unlikely female empowerment, Miss Bala toys with exploitation and social commentary but doesn’t have the ingenuity or nerve to successfully pull off either.

Chappie is a bucket of bolts, Blomkamp’s desire to say meaningful things outdistancing his ability to say them compellingly.

A frustrating drama that struggles to be either a thoughtful character study or a slow-burn thriller.

This gentle comedy has some touching moments between Crystal and Tiffany Haddish, playing a struggling singer who befriends his character, but Here Today ultimately proves too saccharine and manipulative to elicit the tearjerking reaction it so strenuously strives to achieve.

Fatman has its wicked charms, but ultimately this cheeky action-comedy is a lot of buildup without sufficient payoff.

An inability to crack the movie’s central mystery — why abandon your dreams to help facilitate someone else’s? — leaves the project feeling a bit like a missed opportunity.

A sporadically funny film that has moments of real heart in what’s otherwise a formulaic study of an aggressive businesswoman who learns to stop being so selfish.

Boasting a darker, more nihilistic streak than the typical comic-book film, this Warner Bros. release has its kinky pleasures and some amusing nastiness, but in the final analysis there’s simply too much flexing of empty attitude — and far too much self-congratulation for how edgy it thinks it is.

This low-budget combination of thriller, horror and satire flaunts a smartass tone that proves deadening, and as the body count starts rising, viewer interest quickly begins dropping.

Lacking the killer instinct of its ferocious titular beasts, Meg 2: The Trench lumbers through the waters, failing as both a gripping thriller and a cheeky ’so bad it’s good’ piece of late-summer escapism.

Intermittently, Father Stu hints at Long’s fascinating contradictions — his earthy bluntness mixing with his sensitive belief in the divine — but the film is not sharp enough to give those contradictions vivid dimension.

Offering predictably heartfelt messages about seizing the day, The Last Word can be very sweet and funny, but its lightness starts to feel cloying rather than ebullient.

Much like its Oscar-winning star, the film coasts along on charm and audience goodwill, although a little more edge might have helped.

Packed with better action sequences and a smidgeon more emotional resonance, this sequel may be more engaging than its predecessor, but the franchise remains a rather clattering and crude affair.

The new film is proudly aware of how ludicrous it is...and the sunnily silly plot mostly functions to get the Bellas to their next song-and-dance number or comedic set piece. Yet, it’s impossible to miss the film’s wheezing tone.

Both overstuffed and underwhelming, Disney’s spectacle-driven reimagining of the beloved holiday staple tries to serve many masters, and the result is a family film straining to be both timeless and timely, simultaneously old-fashioned yet cheekily irreverent.

There are plenty of would-be tearjerking moments in Family Business as different generations of this family reaffirm how much they mean to each other, but the sincerity of those scenes is consistently undercut by the filmmakers’ insistence on overdoing everything: the schmaltz, the slapstick, the feverish pace.

Feels manipulative and glib ... Farrelly’s tendency toward simplistic bromides in Green Book is even more egregious here.

Although there are plenty of lyrical moments, Zemeckis’ lack of restraint and some questionable narrative choices undo what should be a moving affair.

Rising star Amandla Stenberg has a few affecting moments as one of the few teen survivors of a mysterious pandemic, but director Jennifer Yuh Nelson’s live-action feature debut mostly walks in the footsteps of bolder and more original takes on similar sci-fi subject matter.

Emma Mackey gives a heartfelt performance as the titular protagonist, whose marriage is collapsing just as she’s about to be named her state’s new governor, and this comedy-drama contains some of the crackling dialogue and disarming candour of Brooks’ best work. Ultimately, however, this disjointed character study ultimately feels as messy as its heroine’s life.

Director Stephen Chbosky badly mishandles the material, resulting in an increasingly frustrating experience in which Evan’s inability to come clean leads to a string of emotional manipulations that sometimes border on cruel.

Although the film’s musical performances galvanise, director Antoine Fuqua reduces The King Of Pop to a blandly inspirational cipher.

Trying to recapture the magic of the 1940 animated classic, Robert Zemeckis’ live-action Pinocchio is a wooden, laboured affair.

The adrenaline never stops pumping in Mile 22, a superficially kinetic thriller that simultaneously attempts to be politically savvy and an ultra-macho shoot-‘em-up. That juggling act proves too sophisticated for director Peter Berg who, in his fourth collaboration with Mark Wahlberg, again demonstrates his sufficient skill at crafting dynamic suspense sequences.

Roland and Vanessa simply aren’t sufficiently compelling to provoke us to fill in the blanks. Pitt brings his usual weathered charm, and Jolie Pitt makes her character’s all-consuming melancholy occasionally ravishing, but there’s not enough depth underneath.

Trying to wring laughs from the nauseating sex-and-stardom exploits of fictional Tinseltown A-lister Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) and his buddies, Entourage consistently comes across as sour, shallow and misogynistic.

Terminator Genisys is a reasonably entertaining and niftily executed sci-fi action-thriller, and yet its ingenuity and craftsmanship are all in service of justifying its existence, resulting in a sequel that can be appreciated for its cleverness but otherwise regarded with a certain amount of ambivalence.

Unfortunately, Gemini Man is saddled with a fatally weak story, almost as if Lee chose a predictable action-thriller narrative so that he could focus his energy on the effects and frame rate. But the result is a quirky-looking movie that’s generally boring.

Thompson brings her reliably spry comedic talents as a new recruit who discovers all the extra-terrestrials in our midst, but she’s easily overmatched by a witless script, laboured plot and, most depressingly, a badly misjudged performance from her usually-charming co-star.

All Eyez on Me risks little, and as a result it’s not worthy of his complicated legacy.

If One Spoon of Chocolate ultimately fails as a grindhouse banger, you still might understand why RZA developed this project for more than a decade. His rage at this inequitable country has only grown more acute as America’s racial divides widen and codify. But like Unique, RZA doesn’t know how to fight his way out of the hell that surrounds him.

While this medium-budgeted action film clearly hopes to launch a cinematic series, the YA trappings feel familiar, despite some intriguing ideas about toxic masculinity and adolescent insecurity.

An agonisingly strained attempt at misanthropic comedy, Bad Santa 2 is puerile when it should be shocking, calculating when it should be transgressive, and listless when it should be liberating.

Timur Bekmambetov’s Ben-Hur remake offers robust spectacle and some decent performances. But ultimately, the director of Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not the ideal filmmaker to capture this timeless story’s more nuanced emotional range.

The result is a picture with gripping sequences and clever byplay, even if there’s a sense that it’s merely repeating past strengths, only not quite as ingeniously.

A ripe, bittersweet romantic tragedy lies at the heart of Tulip Fever, but director Justin Chadwick’s aggressive tastefulness smothers the life from this potentially lusty melodrama.

Writer-director Dean Craig gathers a winning ensemble for his dark comedy and, intermittently, the characters’ rank awfulness is a joy to behold. But despite boasting a fair amount of snide one-liners and a general air of gleeful misanthropy, the film ends up becoming strained and predictable, not quite liberating or shocking enough.

The film may pretend it’s more sophisticated than the show that spawned it, but its comedic stylings are alarmingly regressive.

The life lessons Reef learns aren’t meaningful, and the movie’s message about making amends is patronizing. In the end, it’s the audience that deserves an apology.

Thurber spends so much time referencing films he loves that Red Notice feels more like an elaborate game of dress-up than a worthy heir to their greatness.

Any hopes of smart social commentary or unsettling psychological underpinnings are quickly shattered by a clichéd screenplay and amateurish performances.

Although the follow-up to the 2023 original boasts colourful animation, too often this Illumination production mistakes visual and narrative busyness for genuine excitement. As a result the film, based on the venerable Nintendo property, suffers from strained humour and cluttered action sequences — issues that will hardly discourage young audiences from coming out in droves.

Assassin’s Creed is nearly wall-to-wall violence, but Kurzel reveals an eye for widescreen composition that, paired with Christopher Tellefsen’s efficient, hyperactive editing, gives the film the tenor of a sophisticated graphic novel.

Lucy In The Sky has ambitious visual flourishes, a bold performance from Natalie Portman and not nearly enough insights into the peculiarities of human behaviour.

Kin never feels like more than uninspired borrowings from other, better genre films; it’s a story about family without any heart.

There’s precious little to care about in a movie that’s neither ingenious nor silly enough to savour.

Like his hungry symbiote latching onto Eddie, Fleischer cunningly fastens a malicious irreverence onto an otherwise lacklustre superhero movie. But the symbiosis doesn’t quite take.

The Kitchen may prove to be a meaningful time-capsule document, but is far less successful as broad entertainment.

This horror-action picture offers modest genre pleasures and a consistently spooky vibe, resulting in a film that has been designed chiefly to ensure future sequels, although the story includes enough emotional shading and robust set pieces to be an engaging standalone feature.

Cabrini is a respectful biopic designed to shed light on a forgotten woman whose charitable acts deserve recognition. It’s also so stultifyingly dutiful you may find yourself missing Sound of Freedom’s tawdry watchability.

Kraven The Hunter is, by far, the most graphic and violent of the Spider-Man Universe pictures, but that extra bloodshed does little to quicken the pulse.

Despite the occasional cheeky moment and brutal slaying, a property that once satirised horror cliches has largely succumbed to them.

Idris Elba makes for a dashing, haunted gunslinger assigned to safeguard the universe, but whether it’s Matthew McConaughey’s hammy turn as an all-powerful villain or the generic effects work, The Dark Tower proves to be a movie filled with faint ambitions and an even weaker pulse.

In the fun but strained Red One, director Jake Kasdan serves up an effects-heavy action comedy with a disarming sweetness that is undone by an overly complicated plot and some tired blockbuster conventions.

A parade of gaudy CGI and strained whimsy, Alice Through The Looking Glass proves even more manic and grating than its 2010 predecessor.

The stakes are higher, the action is bigger, the ambitions are grander, the jokes are appreciably less funny. Like many comedy sequels, Zoolander 2 supersizes everything in such a way that it’s that much more apparent how few of the jokes are connecting.

As a commentary on the modern blockbuster, the movie’s fascinating. But as an actual movie, it’s fairly disheartening.

The perfunctory martial-arts sequences and convoluted plotting conspire to make this a painfully uninspired proposition.

The whole endeavour ends up feeling fussy and clever rather than incisive and nuanced — especially when a late twist seriously jeopardises plausibility.

Unfortunately, this adaptation of the popular 2014 video game fails at delivering scares or cheeky laughs, resulting in a tedious experience that relies heavily on horror’s most cliched tropes.

Sometimes sexy, sometimes campy, Fifty Shades Darker is a smorgasbord of silliness, its dopey pleasures indistinguishable from its many awkwardly melodramatic moments.

The Longest Ride plays like cynical fan service to Sparks’ readers, who, it is assumed, will be content to sit back and enjoy a cheap tearjerker, no matter how mouldy its execution is.

The first Transporter film in seven years is moderately entertaining and reliably ludicrous in all the predictable ways, but the film’s new sharp-dressed driver doesn’t possess the effortless stoic wit of the original trilogy’s Jason Statham, which ends up making all the difference.

For audiences craving shoot-‘em-up carnage, the sequel contains an abundance of explosions, car crashes and kill shots, although the strained air of hip irreverence soon turns suffocatingly stale.

Unfortunately, there is not much ingenuity or inspiration to Snyder’s vision.

The downside to a film that includes multiple shots of a clock counting down is that it provides audiences with an unintended rooting interest: we’re just hoping it gets to zero soon so we can leave the theatre.

Between the overblown poor CG, witless dialogue and pervasive, numbing violence, the new Hellboy deserves its own special circle in Dante’s inferno.

The actors lend sincerity to the proceedings, but the film keeps cheating to achieve its dramatic payoffs.

Although Reese Witherspoon and Sofía Vergara do have their fleetingly amusing moments, this road-trip buddy comedy feels like it rolled off the cliché assembly line, offering wan laughs and familiar setups.

The only thing saving the film from utter catastrophe is Watts.

The Crow longs to be edgy and sobering, but the shallow, melodramatic treatment constantly calls to mind an insecure adolescent male who is trying to prove how dark and deep he is by dressing all in black and talking ponderously about death.

A drearily sincere movie about faith and tolerance, Little Boy boasts plenty of good intentions but very little else.

The film is a black hole that sucks comedy into its vortex, never to be seen again.

Despite a few touching scenes in which Sophie and Agatha reassert their bond amidst handsome suiters and devious spells, Good And Evil ends up feeling both too busy and too underdeveloped to let their relationship blossom. There’s no happily ever after awaiting audiences at the film’s end.

The Ghost Dimension isn’t exactly frightening — the setup is so well-worn now that it’s hard to be particularly startled by what transpires — but it’s able to wring sufficient dread out of this franchise’s go-to fears.

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are a lot less fun this time around, paired with a fumbling John Lithgow and a stiff Mel Gibson as their overbearing fathers who stop by for the holidays.

A stunningly misjudged comedy, Rock The Kasbah stretches and strains Bill Murray’s deadpan nonchalance until it snaps, and what results is a singularly unfunny, often infuriating tale.

A grab bag of vulgarities, sex jokes, slapstick, nudity and chase scenes, the action-comedy CHIPS holds together better than expected, thanks largely to the goofy, dim-bulb rapport between stars Dax Shepard and Michael Peña.

Last Knights is little more than a dutifully compiled collection of genre conventions, its tale of a group of brave knights seeking vengeance for their fallen leader so undemanding that it’s almost charmingly pedestrian.

While the actors and puppeteers are committed to The Happytime Murders’ surreal reality, they almost do too good a job: This world’s authenticity is so complete that you’re left mostly slogging through how inanimate most everything else about the movie is.

This series’ tone-deaf humour and dull nods to selfless heroism have become toxic irritants — a sensation not helped by the film’s collection of clattering, joyless robots and dopey humans.

A good cast led by Miles Teller gets swallowed up in a narrative that grows progressively more muddled and tedious.

Whether it’s Downey’s mannerisms or the dull quipping provided by his menagerie of digital co-stars, Dolittle is a joyless slog trying to pretend it’s a hip, magical adventure.

It’s fleetingly amusing to watch Blanchett flex her wit and grace amidst this motley crew of outsiders and reprobates. But Lilith so easily outclasses everything around her that Borderlands is that rare would-be blockbuster where you wish the main character could get her own standalone feature, just so she can escape this meagre adventure.

No matter how likeable Cassie and her friends are, they are powerless in the face of a plot that goes through the motions, revealing ‘shocking’ twists about her past and building to an overblown finale. Madame Web argues that no one’s future is written, but it is very easy to see exactly where this film is going.

The killer mascots may spring the coop, but this sequel never breaks free of its own conventionality.

Taylor can’t juggle the different tones, and as Sue tries to stay a step ahead of the crooks and the cops as her lies threaten to unravel, the film’s attempts at societal critique feel facile.

Infuriatingly manipulative and insufferably preachy.

Attempting to celebrate the power of community and new beginnings, Sia’s directorial debut mostly serves as an unintended cautionary tale about chronic whimsy and outdated ideas.

Fantasy Island is the sort of inept, forgettable disaster that doesn’t even induce so-bad-it’s-good chuckles.

The film is mostly unmoving, neither the romance nor the social consciousness succeeding in stirring our emotions. Even worse, Penn lets the plight of displaced Africans slip into the background, resulting in yet another well-meaning film that wants to address planetary ills by concentrating our attention on the good-looking outsiders who come in to save the day.

A film as mindless and disposable as most smartphone apps — and nowhere near as addictive — Sony’s animated The Emoji Movie is a calamitous comedy that inadvertently shows how difficult it is to pull off the witty, imaginative world-building that Pixar makes seem so breezy.

Despite the clear compassion the filmmakers have for the title character and those in her orbit, the result is an oddly alienating movie that treats every plot point with hyperbolic life-or-death stakes.

Expertly assisted by a sexy, funny performance from Adèle Haenel, director Pierre Salvadori spins sufficient gold from a contrived storyline and some endearingly flawed characters.

Filmmaker Sergey Dvortsevoy thrusts us into a desperate situation and then offers little relief, which effectually captures his heroine’s fraught mind-set but also, unfortunately, begins to produce diminishing dramatic returns.

The violence is never stylized, Córdova showing its subtle, corrosive force in these people’s lives.

This tale of repression and injustice is potent enough to overcome the inevitable distancing that occurs because of the animation process.

A Shape Of Things To Come may not offer any grand insights into the never-ending battle between humanity and nature — between taking part in society and leaving it all behind — but this minor-key documentary suggests that, like some wild animals, Sundog is perhaps someone you don’t want to corner. There’s no telling what he might do.

Project Silence presents us with a kaleidoscope of different characters all caught up in the same terrible nightmare, but very few of them have lively personalities – and the same holds true for the film itself. The dogs may be merciless, but Kim Tae-gon never goes for the throat.

What emerges is a history lesson but also a personal journey of sorts for Koch and Schachmann, grandchildren of Jewish immigrants who discover an emotional connection to their cultural roots along the way.

Del Toro’s undying adoration for his fantastical creatures leaves us hungry to learn more about the inner workings of the man who brought them to life.